EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 1 - Funk 150 BPM
Genre of the Day - Funk 150 BPM 🇧🇷
Album of the Day - Sem Limites by DJ RaMeMes (O DESTRUIDOR DO FUNK)
June 1, 2024
I’ve listened to music all over the spectrum from plaintively slow to viciously fast over the course of this column, yet I’ve never really delved into the implications of speeding up music. Amidst the bucolic Drake-type-beat dominance of the late 2010s, the nightcore and chipmunked songs that had once dominated the YouTube song-speed-changing sphere gave way to slowed and reverb-heavy songs; TikTok swung the pendulum the other way in the last couple of years, with the resurgence of sped up songs ensuring you can cram the most music and sense of energy into a video. While some purists might clutch their pearls, the practice of speeding up or slowing down songs has long been established. As this Adam Neely video explains, European orchestras in the late 1800s began to pitch up their instruments’ tunings to create a contrasting invigorating sense compared to rival orchestras. In the dance-dominated 1980s, many producers across popular genres began to abuse the varispeed function to speed up single versions of songs which inadvertently gave Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” that frequency that broke computers.
This is all to say that it’s nothing new for producers and genres by extension to gradually begin to probe higher speeds to push the energetic envelope in a particular genre. At its core, it forces the music to unmistakably stand out. This is what has happened in the Brazilian funk scene. Brazilian funk is the sound that people clamor for across the nation for its danceability and deep, electronic sound that initially took the best of Miami bass but Brazil-ectrified it with unconventional, distinctive bass melodies and Afro-Brazilian rhythm patterning. Though it developed out of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas as the music of the people, its national ascendance ensured that a tug-of-war of funk dominance has ensued between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Funk 150 BPM sees Rio de Janeiro taking funk’s sonic evolution by the horns in recent years. Emerging in the late 2010s, Rio funk DJs began to experiment with fast, unvarnished concoctions of pitched-up samples and experimental, crashing productions. Though the speediness does help make their rhythms stand out and stir a fast and furious high tide in the funk scene, it initially came about from an artist called DJ Polyvox imitating the fast drumming of a Coca-Cola bottle in his music production platform. The ability to integrate the everyday sounds of a funkeira’s (funk DJ) world like simple bottle drumming with the capabilities of modern music production studios underlines the beating heart of funk 150 BPM’s creative direction.
Taking stock of Brazilian hits that can instantly bring people to the dance floors, DJ RaMeMes, who ominously dubs himself the destroyer of funk, reconfigures them to rock those same dancers’ worlds with his racing beats and ear-blasting percussion. There is a dizzying array of sonic sinews woven together from opener “Ei Mané Você Acha Que Seu Som É Bom.” Repeated pitched rap samples trash for space, but he aims for a method to the madness that reminds me of the sample haven of Chicago’s juke. Maximalism doesn’t just apply to speed, but pervades the whole production in terms of possibility: the high-velocity snares and lasers sparring with the fractured rapping of “Sentando na Glock Rajada” sets out to prove the point that this really is an album without limits. “Trazendo a Seda no Piq do Tambor” features some of the most aggressively nightcored samples possible; DJ RaMeMes clearly takes a no-holds-barred approach as he rips up, reconfigures, and alchemizes his sample choices. It’s a testament to how we’re all helpless subjects to simple math as music listeners: sometimes, simply changing the number of beats per minute reopens new sonic and experiential horizons.